


Insomniac

by silkinsilence



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Cunnilingus, F/F, Hate Sex, Infidelity, Painplay, Pre-Fall of Overwatch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-02-08 15:44:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18626275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silkinsilence/pseuds/silkinsilence
Summary: ⌖ Moira finds herself running out of time and gropes for an anchor to cling to.‌





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a series of loosely connected scenes exploring Moira's development during her time in Blackwatch and, eventually, Talon, as well as my headcanons regarding her, through the lens of her relationships with three women. Generally kind of depressing in tone; if you're looking for fluff, you're gonna want to keep looking.
> 
> I don't know how many chapters there will be; my guess is 3-5. I would have finished the whole thing and published it as a oneshot, but I was feeling impatient and thirsty for that sweet, sweet validation.
> 
> Heavily inspired by the song "[Glass Slipper](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef-qXVZdfMk)" by _The Dresden Dolls._

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Uncertainty, self-hatred, and a snake eating its own tail.

Gérard Lacroix’s wife makes a pretty picture spread-eagled in her marriage bed with her lipstick smeared and her eyes glazed over. She’s coming down from her third orgasm, and her whole body heaves as she catches her breath. Even sweaty and limp, she’s gorgeous, which is almost enough to drown out anything else Moira might be feeling. Moira’s wet too, underneath her trousers and underwear, and for a few minutes perhaps she can just enjoy that. Enjoy fucking her superior’s wife while he’s hundreds of kilometers away and none the wiser.

There certainly is much about Amélie to enjoy. At _Le Papillon_ earlier in the evening, Moira’s attention was really only for the female lead, who played the titular butterfly to perfection. Her long legs were strong and graceful while she spun and held herself up _en pointe_ , but Moira likes them better draped over her shoulders. Her arms matched each pose with a surgeon's precision, but they are better-suited to wrapping around Moira’s back and digging greedy nails into her shirt. Her face portrayed each exquisite expression required to tell a story without words, but it is much prettier in the throes of pleasure.

A private dance, Moira thinks. One just for her benefit. Perhaps Gérard hasn’t even seen his wife like this, if he can’t be bothered to come home and touch her every now and again.

Amélie has enough energy left to wrap a hand around Moira’s tie and pull her down. Their mouths crash together, not quite matching each other’s movements, with Amélie still hot and needy and Moira doing as good a job of it as she ever does. She’s much too warm; Amélie divested her of the suit coat but nothing else, and Moira’s undershirt is clinging to her sweaty skin and the cuffs and collar of her button-down feel too constricting.

Not that she deserves to be comfortable, given who she is and what she’s doing.

“Spend the night,” Amélie says. It comes out like an order, but Moira looks down at her face and her naked body and sees it for the plea it is. A married woman lonely enough to bring home a stranger who introduced herself backstage as a coworker of her husband lacks the leverage to order. She invited Moira to fuck her in order to feel wanted, and now this is more of the same. She wants a reassurance that she is not reprehensible enough to leave alone, that there is enough of her to satiate until the next morning at least. Moira is certain that she herself is irrelevant to that equation; Amélie sees her as a means to an end. It would disturb her more if it were a less familiar feeling, and if the sentiment wasn’t true the other way around.

Moira is bored of playing. In lieu of responding, she digs her teeth into Amelie’s throat again. Her fingers plunge back into the chasm between her thighs, so open and wet for her that she can fit three without a stretch.

She listens and feels Amélie’s moans, how her responsive body shivers and bends and rocks against her. She enjoys these forbidden fruits for a moment longer before withdrawing, leaving the young wife staring up at her with her doe eyes wide and pleading.

“ _Un moment_ ,” Moira husks, offering her a kiss on the forehead before turning her back in search of the bathroom.

The mirror hung above the sink is splattered with dried toothpaste and specks of saliva. The white paint of its frame is chipping away in places to reveal the old wood underneath. Nobody’s cleaned it in months, she’d wager. Maybe years.

She is still the most lopsided thing in the aging bathroom. Even with water splashed over her skin she still feels greasy. Her skin looks stretched and pallid; insistent wrinkles are beginning to form around her mouth and eyes. _You are getting older,_ they crow, and her stomach twists with all the horror of a prettier, younger woman with much more to lose to age.

Well, maybe not much more.

She takes a mental inventory while her hands shake against the porcelain. Memory? It seems she’s remembering less, but that could be the stress of the past months, the weight of her own mounting expectations, Gabriel driving them all to the breaking point. Frustration? When is she not frustrated. Impulsivity? Well, certainly this is impulsive, shacking up in an apartment not her own with a woman she’s been on a first-name basis with for a handful of hours.

In the dim light her red eye appears more muddy brown. A shit eye. How appropriate.

Downhill, she sneers at herself. But when has she not been going downhill? Can any segment of her life properly be considered an incline, or has it just been decade upon decade of digging a grave?

She takes off her tie and unbuttons her shirt enough that she feels like she can breathe again. She’s tired. That’s one box unchecked, at least. She can still sleep. It sounds vaguely pleasant to take Amélie up on her request and spend the night in Gérard Lacroix’s bed with her arms around his wife. An excellent way to abandon the fact that, whatever flimsy excuses she gave Gabriel and herself, this was the reason she came to Paris. She can’t retaliate against her superior’s slight directly, so she takes what she can instead.

Amélie is not a thing. She deserves better than a husband who leaves her alone and a lover who fucks her and forgets about her. Moira will not be that better thing, but she acknowledges that Amélie deserves it, and acknowledging it feels close enough to washing her hands that, when she decides she will not be spending the night, she doesn’t feel guilty at all.

Outside, Paris is dark but still lively. Moira intends to head for the metro, and then Gare du Nord to catch a train back to Zurich, but she can’t muster the necessary energy to get her feet to move. She leans against the old brick of a church near the Lacroixs’ apartment. She feels nauseous and her head is pounding as if she had much more to drink than a single glass of wine during intermission, hours ago.

Why did she do this? Did she expect it to feel good? She knows how these things go, and she was surely not stupid enough to imagine that _this time would be different—_ no, she’s just determined to retrace her steps over and over again, determined to redo an experiment a hundred times if she must even as the evidence piles up that her hypothesis was a failed one from the start.

* * *

“Moira, you’re slow! You think an omnic couldn’t get you while you’re running like that? Put your heart and your ass into it or we’ll use real weapons next time as incentive.”

She curses Reyes in every language she can think of while she huddles behind the makeshift barriers of the training floor. She hears McCree’s footsteps, quick and loud, from the right, and she forces herself to her feet again to prepare herself. Maybe she can get the draw on him, and end this farce of a simulation—

But her little practice pea-shooter is barely raised before McCree is around the corner, and he’s pulled the trigger, and the sensors are blaring to indicate she’s dead, yet again.

“Sorry,” McCree says jovially. “Hey, I think it really was better that time.”

“Yes, thank you,” she brushes him off crisply. She lowers the gun and glowers up at the overhanging balcony, where their commander watches them with inscrutable eyes.

“All right, that’s enough,” Reyes decides. “Jesse, you’re dismissed.”

Moira is relieved, or would be relieved if shame and anger at her own pitiful performance weren’t burning through her like acid. Why does he insist on continuing this sham? Does he get off on watching her fail, again and again? Does he know what it does to her to be forced into this, to be unable to succeed no matter how many times she’s put through the paces?

When Reyes finally joins her on the training floor, his gaze is even and unreadable. He doesn’t look disappointed, although he must be. Nor does he say anything; he waits for her own temper to boil up and over. Moira knows that’s what he’s doing and hates to be predictable, but she is too angry to stay her tongue.

“Shall we do this again tomorrow, or do you realize what a waste of time it is?”

“It’s not a waste of time.”

“You hired me for my contributions to the field of _genetics,_ not _gunplay_ , and I could be doing what you pay me for right now if it weren’t for these fruitless _exercises._ ”

“Then how are your contributions to the field of genetics coming?” Reyes waits a heartbeat, interprets her furious silence correctly, and continues. “We need a field medic, and I’m not taking anyone with me who can’t defend themselves. So you’ll learn, and then it’ll be you.”

“Why not teach McCree how to wield a syringe?” She doesn’t bother to differentiate that a Ph.D. in human genetics and genomics renders her about as qualified to be a medic as a missionary. Once he gets his mind on something, it is difficult to dissuade him. Unfortunately, his instincts are usually impeccable, which undoubtedly swells his head and leads him to more errant conclusions, like this one.

“Cute. I know you can do it. Just try, Moira.”

“I am trying,” she says, and if it’s through gritted teeth he doesn’t need to know that.

He looks her up and down.

“Do you know Ziegler’s working with Amari? She’s learning how to shoot. A pacifist barely out of school, but she wants in the field.”

He plays her like a fiddle and she knows it, but she can’t help her reaction even when she knows it’s exactly what he wants.

“Why should I care what she’s doing,” she says, the hostility in her voice undermining her words.

“Just thought you’d be interested.” His brown eyes bore into her for a few seconds longer before he decides the conversation is finished and turns away. “Again tomorrow. You’re getting better, you know.”

She stands alone and silent and fumes while his footsteps echo in the vast space. She is unable to move even when the doors close behind him. Her lab awaits, safe and sterile and away from these nuisances, but his taunts ring in her ears.

Overwatch’s little angel, flying into battle, eh? Not satisfied with the glory she’s won off the battlefield, is she? Maybe an omnic will shoot her dead; it would be good riddance, except the world would make her into a martyr. So much younger than Moira but so much—so much—

She unloads the pistol’s simulated ammo into a training bot. A barbaric release of frustration, but it still feels good when it cries out and falls to the ground.

* * *

“How are you doing, Moira?”

She’s still fully dressed, but those eyes look at her like she’s naked as the day she was born. They look at her like they see exactly who she is, everything she’s ever thought and done. What an awesome thing, to be seen so completely.

It is, of course, just her imagination. Genetics, Moira’s own burden, lend Ana Amari’s eyes their particular focus. The tattoo certainly doesn’t hurt.

But after days on the training range with Reyes shouting down at her, and nights in the lab while her experiments fail, it feels good to indulge in the fantasy.

“I’m fine.”

“Just fine?” Ana crosses her legs and settles back in her chair. Moira’s chair, really, if she spent enough time in her tiny accommodations to consider the room _hers._ “Don’t be short with me.”

She could tell her about her real frustrations, about Reyes’ ludicrous demands, about the way the thought of Angela Ziegler rankles her. She could tell her so many more things, like what she’s done to herself and what’s been done to her and how she ended up here at all.

But she doesn’t tell her about any of that, because that is not their relationship, and that is not why she is here. Ana doesn’t want words from her, and she doesn’t want to let them go in the first place.

She wants Ana, perhaps, to know without her saying.

_Confess._

“I’m fine, Captain Amari,” she says, and her tone is less brusque this time. She lowers her head in a show of deference she will not offer Reyes, has offered few others. But then, she doesn’t play this game with Reyes. This is for her and Ana only, a fantasy constructed for the two of them.

“Then what are you doing here?” Ana cups her hand in her chin and looks up at her.

“I want you—to punish me.” It comes out clipped and businesslike, easier than it has before. They both know why they’re there, and why drag out the unnecessary?

“Undress,” Ana orders.

Moira’s long fingers go first to the buttons of her white shirt, and she undoes them with the skill acquired from years of buttoning up and down. Then she reaches around to unstrap her plain white bra, and it falls to the floor as well. Her belt follows, and then her pants and socks and shoes.

She stands lanky and ill-proportioned and bony, her skin sallow like yogurt going bad and her veins underneath like greenish worms infesting her body. She is decomposing; she is a dead woman walking; it is only a matter of time, and the resource that seemed so abundant when she was twenty is slipping through her fingers now.

Ana places a warm finger on the dip of her stomach. She stands up and brings her finger with her, until her hand cups Moira’s face.

The warmth and the touch feel good, but they aren’t why Moira called her. The kiss, messy, is not why either, though she enjoys it when teeth dig hard into her lip and Ana begins sucking. When she breaks away, Moira’s mouth feels swollen and tingling.

“The bed,” Ana says, and she lightly shoves Moira away. “Bend over the edge. Don’t look behind you.”

Moira obeys. She stands with her arms braced on the duvet and her head hanging. She hears a rustling sound, and then Ana’s gentle footsteps as she moves toward her, and then the vicious and sudden _snap_ of leather on leather.

Her belt.

“Count,” Ana says. That is the only warning Moira gets before the strike comes, catching her upper thighs. She spreads her legs in an instinctive invitation, but there will be no relief of that sort here and now.

“One.”

Again, on her buttocks this time. Ana does not hold back. She has a strong arm, and the lashes _hurt._ Moira’s skin is burning already.

“Two.”

Three and four come close after each other, and five catches her lower back. The welts will last days. Sitting will prove difficult. There is very little meat on her bones to absorb the shock.

Moira lets her eyes close. She counts out each number automatically, but she is no longer in the room with Ana. She is hovering somewhere dark and familiar. The pain is a welcome cocoon. It is the only thing there with her, and she lets it envelop her. She feels each strike acutely and lets the sting of it resonate through her. This is what she deserves, and how glorious to live, even just for a few vanishing minutes, in a world where people get what they deserve.

At twenty her whole body is throbbing and her arms are shaking, and when the twenty-first strike comes she does not count it as she has the others.

“I’m sorry!” she bursts out.

The twenty-second strike does not come. Instead Ana’s hands are warm and comforting on her back. Moira is unable to relax into the touch. Her whole body feels sore, not just the abused skin of her ass.

“I forgive you,” Ana says, still so conversational. She threads a hand through Moira’s short hair and scratches at her scalp like she’s petting an obedient dog. Moira dislikes the touch. She has finished what she came here for.

She turns and makes to drop to her knees, but Ana forestalls her with a gentle hand on her forearm.

“Not today.”

Moira is left unable to immediately respond to that; her first instinct is panic. Is Ana bored with her? Without reciprocity there will be no reason for her to come the next time Moira calls, and whatever she tells herself to stifle the disgust, she knows that there will be a next time.

“Not—?”

“Not today,” Ana repeats. She is still smiling. She is always inscrutable. How frustrating that would be, Moira imagines, if this were something more than it is. A reason not to want it to be more than it is.

Ana bends down and holds up Moira’s trousers. She steps into them, still reluctant. The cloth feels soothing on her tender skin. She hopes that sitting down will hurt for days. She wants to feel it as long as she possibly can, like as long as she’s in pain she’ll have an excuse for whatever monstrous things she does.

Ultimately Moira finds herself unable to contain the curiosity prickling at the edge of her mind. She’s most of the way dressed and doing the buttons on her shirt when the words spill from her tongue.

“Commander Reyes told me that you’re teaching Ziegler to shoot.”

Ana’s smile is replaced by surprise.

“Why do you mention that?”

Moira gropes about for an explanation that makes her sound less pitiful than she is.

“I thought she was too much of a pacifist to even let her hands be sullied by a gun.” She can’t stop herself from sneering.

“I think you two are similar,” Ana says.

“Please don’t insult me, Captain Amari,” Moira says with a dramatic roll of her eyes. Ana inclines her head in concession but can’t hide her smile.

“No insult intended.”

Her shirt is buttoned. Moira stretches her arms above her head. Time to return to the lab and the quagmire of uncertainty that awaits her there. She gestures toward the door, and Ana takes the hint, murmuring a farewell and leaving Moira alone in her room.

She slowly pulls on her socks and shoes. Her ass throbs. She tells herself her private joke, like she always does: maybe she hasn’t outgrown Catholicism after all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An angel and a demon, and how well they fit those roles.

Reyes doesn’t like them venturing outside of Blackwatch’s allotted sector of the base, but the cafeteria has better options and Moira isn’t in a mood to respect her commander’s wishes, even if the consequences of not doing so could prove damaging to her career. It’s not her first infraction and it won’t be her last, unless Reyes forces her into the field tomorrow.

They wind up elbow-to-elbow in the line, waiting for the omnics behind the counter to serve them. Moira recognizes her at once, and the emotion that runs through her is somewhere between spite and excitement. She’s surprisingly short, though admittedly most people are short to her. Her hair looks almost white, devoid of color, under the fluorescents. She isn’t smiling, and the ugly shadows under her eyes say she hasn’t been sleeping either.

Moira is staring, but Angela Ziegler, irritatingly, either fails to notice or simply doesn’t react. Moira follows her through the line as omnics scoop food onto both of their trays, and she waits for something to happen, until finally, knowing what a foolish idea it is, she makes something happen herself.

“Doctor Ziegler! I’m so in awe of your work.” With any luck, the sarcasm remains safely in her own mind and not in her tone.

“Thank you,” Ziegler says, glancing over her shoulder and paying Moira barely the minimum amount of attention required to avoid rudeness. Moira is delighted; this is fuel to the fire and more confirmation of her pet theory that Ziegler’s head must be so swollen that there’s little room for _thinking_ left, but then—

Then she does a double-take, and this time she _looks._

Moira is taken aback at first, wondering if Ziegler actually recognizes her. While her name is infamous enough in certain circles, her face is much less well-known, but maybe…

But Ziegler does not frown or glare. Her eyes quickly but obviously sweep up and down Moira’s form. Her gaze sharpens. Her pretty doll lips curl upward into a much more genuine smile.

Moira understands.

“I haven’t seen you around before,” Ziegler says, in her pretty lilting accent. She nods towards Moira’s lab coat and her ID badge, half-sticking out of her pocket. Her name, luckily, is obscured.

“I keep to myself. Not really one for crowds.” Moira shrugs. Her smile is unwavering. “But perhaps I should leave the lab more if it means running into a woman as famous as yourself.”

Ziegler’s cheeks grow pink. The sight brings all the spiteful bitterness back to Moira. She hates the woman standing before her, and she hates herself for carrying such a pointless, jealous grudge.

Countless stars will shine brighter than her own. Legions of knowledge-seekers will, unlike Moira, be deified for their efforts, have their names appear in children’s books and emblazoned on university walls and seized and trademarked for corporate pursuits. In that crowd, Ziegler is just one among many.

But she is so young, and so _lauded,_ and, Moira will admit to herself, as she returns the once-over, so lovely.

“You’re even more beautiful in person,” she says, and wants to kick herself for laying it on so thick. But when Ziegler’s lips curl still upward and she looks bashfully away, it is worth it. All the brains in the world, perhaps, but Ziegler is still weak to a compliment.

Moira wonders what else she’s weak to.

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Ziegler says, like she’s not wearing her blush for the world to see. “And I can’t imagine I look halfway decent when I haven’t slept in thirty hours—”

“Imperfections are prettier,” Moira cuts in smoothly. A line, and perhaps an obvious one, but in this case it is not untrue. There is something more attractive in the messiness of Ziegler’s hair and the shadows under her eyes than a smooth face could ever be.

“You’re quick with your tongue.”

“Yes,” Moira grins.

“Well.” They have reached the doorway out of the cafeteria, both their trays bearing food and both their faces bearing smiles. “I should be getting back to my office.”

“Of course,” Moira says. “As should I.”

“I’m afraid that, though you clearly know who I am, I can’t say the same.” She tilts her head. Her eyes are blue and pretty and guileless.

“I’m a genetics researcher under the purview of Commander Reyes. Doctor Moira O’Deorain.”

Ziegler’s expression shifts in an instant: surprise, disbelief, and then revulsion. Moira is almost touched that she’s familiar enough with her work to have such a reaction. Moira’s peers in the field may scorn her, may shun and disavow her, but perhaps ire is better than indifference. It is better to stand alone and hated than it is to stand invisible in a crowd. Just like it’s always been for her.

“What are you—you—” Ziegler is sputtering. Moira moves around her to go through the cafeteria doors.

“I really should get back to the lab. It was lovely meeting you, Doctor Ziegler.”

She leaves down the hallway without looking back. She imagines the encounter was perfect. She imagines herself filled with vindictive satisfaction rather than a twisted sinking feeling. She imagines being satisfied.

* * *

When she was a teenager, she used to fantasize about getting a motorcycle. She can think of many reasons now, though she can’t remember what the primary one was back then. Trying to discern which it was makes her wonder whether she’s just malforming her memories into a suitable narrative. The desire for freedom sounds nice, suitably heroic. The small-town dyke with a dead father and an overbearing mother dreams of running away, speeding down endless roads like her life was a thing as under her control as the bike. Maybe she just thought girls would like it.

Less romantically, maybe she wanted to appear even slightly more cool than she actually was. She was, then as now, pale and gangly like a plant raised in the dark, better-suited for a life hunched over a microscope than out under the sun.

She thought about it more and more after she went away to university and never came back. It sounded so exhilarating. She never once thought about crashing, even in an abstract way, even after her mother died behind the wheel. She wouldn’t die on a motorcycle. That wasn’t how she was destined to go.

In her tiny room on-base in Zurich, with the lights off and an arm over her face, she revisits those fantasies. She is atop a machine that rumbles comfortingly beneath her and sways as her body sways. She rides so fast that her eyes tear up and then the drops are blown away. No helmet or goggles within the safe cushion of imagination.

The road stretches straight on and on as far as she can see, and she is the only person there. It is not Switzerland or Ireland or indeed any of the places she’s ever been. It’s somewhere wild but calm, with fields of wild grass laid out to the horizon. The sun has just set and the sky is golden and pink and deep blue. Distant worlds glint overhead. Her and the bike and the road, utterly alone.

The ache that rises in her chest is familiar, and she is frustrated with herself. She sits up and drags her hands through her hair and tries to ignore the clock blinking half-past two in the morning.

She can’t sleep.

She’s struggled with insomnia for almost as long as she can remember, but every night it feels like a new and dreadful phenomenon. Every time sleep eludes her, the same panic descends. Does the insomnia cause the terror or the other way around?

She might be able to sleep tomorrow night, or the night after. There are dozens of other explanations for her inability to sleep: a late cup of coffee, her latest experimental attempts, her over-warm room.

Or she might not be able to sleep tomorrow night. She might stay awake and awake and awake until she falls asleep in the most final sense of the word.

Recreational drug use is technically banned on base, but the rules are spottily enforced and always seem to apply less to Blackwatch than to their cleaner-handed colleagues. The worst that can happen is a slap on the wrist from Reyes, and she gets those so frequently anyway she would hardly notice. So she leaves her bed for her desk, switches on the lamp, and rolls a joint with all the precision of lab work. She switches her lamp off again and reaches for her lighter. It glows like a tiny ember in the dark.

Her thoughts circle back to a road she’s never been on and a sky she’s never been under. The ache comes back slowly until it envelops her like the weed. A hazy cloud separating her from her senses, bringing her away from her body.

She isn’t too old. She could still buy a motorcycle. She could take it out on the Swiss roads winding up into the Alps. Or she could take all her accumulated vacation days and head out to the places that McCree is always jabbering about, canyons and red rock and dust.

But if she went, it would ruin the imaginings. Nothing real is ever as good as something imagined. It would leave her hollow and wanting and groping in the dark.

_What do you want?_ she asks herself. A bad night, if she’s let herself get to that question. But her chest aches and her body feels heavy and she notes that the answer is the same as ever.

Something different.

Fed up with herself, with navel-gazing in the dark, she pulls her socks on and takes the joint with her as she heads toward the lab.

* * *

The annual Halloween party is decidedly not her idea of a good time, and if she had her way she would be spending the evening in the lab, working on the latest tests that are finally, _finally_ showing results. But Reyes told them it was the party or combat drills all night, so here she is, with her hair gelled back and a leather jacket pulled over her white undershirt. Fingerless leather gloves, tight black pants, and motorcycle boots complete the outfit. She may never be a biker in actuality, but she can play at being one tonight.

The too-loud music pulses through her head and the large hall pulses with various shades of colored light. Her coworkers have disappeared into the crowd. She edges along the wall toward the pop-up bar, where the omnic attendant serves her a whiskey on the rocks at her request.

She catches sight of a tall, slender woman with dark hair falling like a sheet around her. Amélie Lacroix seems to feel herself being watched, for she turns and catches sight of Moira too. Her eyes widen and her lips part, and then she’s giving Moira a _look_ that says many things, few of which are appropriate for the setting. Moira remembers how Amélie felt stretched around her fingers, and her high, breathy cries, and making new memories in the same vein as the old seems like a very pleasant way to spend the evening.

But then a hand is wrapping around Amelie’s arm and Gérard is leading her off into the crowd, none the wiser about his wife’s bedroom eyes or how easily she comes for a stranger.

The vindictive delight is so faint now. Gérard is a fool. But he is still the one with the ring around his finger and the pretty young wife claiming she loves him.

Moira squeezes her eyes closed tight as if that will quell the feeling. She imagines the road stretched out before her and the bike swerving into oncoming traffic.

She settles herself against the wall and sips at her drink until it’s gone, and then she sips at the water as the ice slowly melts.

Reyes is at this party. Ana, too. McCree. Her various associates from Blackwatch. Surely she could find and talk to someone, rather than leaning against this wall and feeling the night pour through her fingers like the rest of her life. But she lacks the energy and the desire and the spark. It is much easier to stay where she is. She just lets her mind wander and thinks about her work and what she would be doing if she wasn’t here.

“They let you attend parties?”

The voice is sharp and angry. Moira opens her eyes.

Angela Ziegler is glaring up at her from under the brim of a large witch’s hat. Moira’s gaze is drawn inexorably downward, where it lands on the curves of her breasts barely concealed beneath the bustier of the dress she’s wearing. It is a daring outfit, but Moira can neither complain nor tear her eyes away.

“As a fellow employee of Overwatch, yes, I was invited to this party,” she says to Ziegler’s cleavage.

“You’re not my fellow.”

Moira sighs. She is very much not in the mood for this.

“If you so detest breathing the same air as me, might I suggest walking away?” she says pointedly. “I assure you my monstrosity isn’t catching.”

Ziegler doesn’t move. She just stands there, eyes narrowed, staring at Moira. Her cheeks are pink, and it occurs to Moira that perhaps she’s indulged too much in the open bar. Getting drunk and picking fights with her coworkers? Not angelic behavior at all.

“Why would they hire you?” Ziegler says, seemingly more to herself than to Moira.

“Please, no work talk.”

“And what is your work?”

“Show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” Moira says airily, figuring that as long as she’s trapped in this conversation she might as well enjoy it. She’s heard herself described as insufferable on many an occasion, and why not tonight?

Ziegler’s cheeks darken at the insinuation, though that could be anger as much as embarrassment.

“I would _never—_ show you—”

“Really? You’re not leaving much to the imagination.” Moira deliberately lets her eyes sweep up and down Ziegler, devouring every inch of smooth, creamy skin and tight-fitting dark cloth. “Someone might think you wanted to show off.”

Ziegler’s eyes flick away and back again. Her cheeks are very red. She’s chewing on the inside of her lip.

She has no retort.

“I meant what I said,” Moira says, committing herself to whatever comes next; it will undoubtedly be more interesting than leaning alone against a wall at the edge of a party she didn’t want to attend. “You _are_ more beautiful in person.”

Ziegler’s eyebrows contract and her pretty face pinches into something like pain as she leans forward. Her finger slips into Moira’s belt loop and tugs. Her face is close enough when she speaks that Moira can feel the warmth of her breath on her face. Moira looks down into her dress and then away and then back again.

“Come with me,” Ziegler whispers.

The medical bay and her adjoining office are on this floor. The bay is dark and quiet; the patient beds are all unoccupied. Moira doubts Ziegler would have brought her here otherwise, lest she risk being seen with the woman she apparently so ardently despises. Even though there is nobody else to disturb them, Ziegler leads her into her office and locks the door behind them.

Moira has a few seconds to glance at the bookshelves and messy desk before Ziegler is discarding her hat, standing on her toes, and leaning in to kiss her. Her kiss is fevered, urgent; her teeth dig not gently into Moira’s lower lip. One hand slides around Moira’s waist and slips into her back pocket to knead at what little ass she has.

Moira is taken aback, though not dissuaded, by her eagerness. She responds the kiss, tilting her head down and opening her mouth for Ziegler’s tongue. She cradles the back of Ziegler’s head and runs her fingers through her soft blond ponytail. Then, as an experiment, she wraps the hair around her hand and _tugs._

Ziegler gasps, breaking off the kiss and providing Moira with a truly exquisite sight. Her cheeks are very red and her eyes dark and hazy. Her pink lips are open in a little _o_ and shining with spit.

“You little _slut_ ,” Moira says wonderingly, and it’s as if she’s a child on her birthday and all her wishes have come true, because maybe Angela Ziegler _is_ brilliant and intelligent and the darling of the medical community, but she also attends work parties half-naked and gets off on having her hair pulled and is Moira’s, Moira’s, in this moment, to debase as she wishes.

Ziegler’s eyes narrow.

“You’re kissing back, you hypocrite.”

“ _I’ve_ never publicly derided you as...what was your phrasing? ‘Emblematic of a science that prizes individual glory and results over accountability and proper methodology.’”

“Was I wrong?” Ziegler hisses.

Moira shrugs.

“Maybe not. But you are kissing me.”

“I always knew you were—horrible,” Ziegler says softly. Her eyes are glassy as she stares up at Moira. Her pupils are blown so large. Moira wonders how wet she is under her excuse for a skirt. “I didn’t know you were—so— _aufreizend._ ”

She breathes the last word and Moira can’t understand it, but then Ziegler’s mouth is hot and wet against her neck and her teeth dig in, and words seem unimportant.

She moves a hand to Ziegler’s waist and squeezes. Then, considering Ziegler is groping her through her own back pocket, she feels comfortable in wandering lower.

Ziegler’s skin is hot to the touch, and her ass is round and firm under Moira’s fingers. She slips under the pane of her skirt and traces the line of her panties. Yes, she can feel the wetness there, right between where her lips are pressed obscenely against the silk.

Her curls escape the confines of her underwear. Moira tugs, and Ziegler gasps.

Moira releases a groan high in her throat and lets her head hang back against the wall. She only had the one whiskey but she feels drunk and too hot. She wants Ziegler. God, she wants her. She’s throbbing and wet and the body pressed against her is so warm and soft.

“Underneath,” Ziegler urges her. Her breath washes warm against Moira’s neck where her teeth have been playing.

“Beg,” Moira says, unable to resist.

Ziegler stares up at her for a few seconds, and Moira is convinced that she’s going to do it, she’s going to plead for Moira to fuck her. But then Ziegler is gripping Moira’s jacket by the lapels and pulling her down and kissing her hard and fierce. Her teeth fasten onto Moira’s lip until it hurts, but Moira will not object. Better to have Angela Ziegler hurt her. If only she would do it like Ana, stand stone-faced and indifferent and belt Moira until her ass is bruised—

Ziegler—Angela— _Angela_ pushes the jacket from Moira’s shoulders and then tugs it down her arms, leaving her in the white undershirt. Even just that is too warm; Moira’s sweaty and only getting hotter as Angela forces their bodies together, as her thigh insistently moves between Moira’s and then is pressing _into_ her.

Moira moans into the kiss. Angela’s hand tangles in her hair, ruining the effort she went to rubbing gel into it. No matter; Moira doesn’t think she’ll be going back to the party. She’s found something better to ride than a motorcycle.

Angela withdraws. Her eyes are dark and her lips are shiny, but she looks so unbearably pleased with herself as she stands a foot away from Moira, stubbornly refusing to close the gap.

“Beg,” she echoes, unbearably chipper.

Moira remembers that she hates this woman, and the warmth seems to dissipate. Does she even want this? Does she want any of this?

Then Angela reaches down under her skirt, under her panties, shameless. When she pulls her hand back out, the fingers of her brown glove are wet and shiny.

Moira doesn’t beg. She steps forward, kisses Angela again, and pushes her roughly back against her desk. Angela kisses back, eager, hungry, and Moira doesn’t bother taking her time. She pulls the bustier roughly down to get at Angela’s breasts. They’re warm and heavy in her lustful hands, and she teases at Angela’s nipples just to hear her moan into the kiss.

She’s hungry like she’s never fucked a woman before, and hunger sends her kissing and biting down Angela’s throat with the intent to leave marks. She wants to force Overwatch’s little angel to wear a high collar lest everyone knows exactly how wet roughness makes her.

Her mouth takes over where her hands were, and she pulls a nipple between her teeth and sucks hard.

“Please!” Angela gasps out. “Please.”

Moira pulls back and smirks up at her. Angela realizes what she said, and her face gets redder and she tries to frown. Her attempts are woefully inadequate to hide her desire, and Moira thinks that perhaps Angela really does get off on begging.

Some part of her knows it’s unfair, but she still smugly stores this information away as proof that her will is stronger.

“As you wish,” she says sardonically, and returns her mouth to Angela’s breasts. She’ll heave hickeys there, too, though presumably Angela’s coworkers won’t see these marks. She loves how she can get Angela to arch her back just by biting hard enough, can make her moan just by pulling her nipples cruelly between her teeth.

She hoists Angela up onto the desk, carelessly crumpling papers left there, and then her hands go wandering. Her stockings are silky to the touch, and the skin of her thighs more so. Moira digs her fingers into the plump flesh there, determined to mark up every inch of her. The moans are pouring from Angela’s mouth now, pretty, lewd noises that fill the office, and Moira wishes there were patients in the medbay to hear them.

She pulls Angela’s skirt aside to expose her panties and the hair nestled around them. They’re black, but even so Moira thinks she can see the stain of her wetness there. She observes for a moment, hungry, her heart going fast and her skin very warm. Then she pulls them down. Angela helps, moving her legs and kicking the scrap of cloth off. Moira grips one leg and then the other, and she pushes them up and back to leave Angela’s thighs splayed wide. Angela’s eyes are fixed intently on her, and her lips are parted and her cheeks flushed. She is exposed and so, so ready.

Moira rubs her thumbs on either side of Angela’s slit and then pulls her gently open just to look. It is an intoxicating sight, her pink lips soaking and soft like petals split open to reveal their precious nectar.

Moira indulges.

Angela makes her loudest noise yet, a gasping moaning _ah_ that resounds through the office and Moira’s own body. She’ll have her own mess to clean up when this is done.

But for now there is just Angela, hot and musky and so wet under her tongue. She pushes her face down with the eagerness of a starving man and kisses and suckles lips, clit, everything. Her thumbs rub gentle circles and keep Angela wide for her tongue when she makes shallow licks into her cunt.

Angela’s hand alights in her hair, and Moira likes that, likes when her fingers tangle in the short red strands and then even dare to tug. It’s good, but Moira won’t beg here and now, and not just because her mouth is otherwise occupied.

“Do it, _Doctor O’Deorain,_ ” Angela says. Her voice is almost a growl, not like the pleas of earlier. Moira supposes that now she’s got her mouth on her, there’s little left to beg for. “Make me come.”

Moira closes her eyes and focuses only on the movements of her tongue and fingers. Angela tastes good, or maybe it’s just been a while since she’s eaten pussy. Perhaps it’s just the thrill of Angela Ziegler claiming to hate her, publicly condemning her, and quivering for ecstasy under her mouth.

She slides two fingers into Angela’s cunt and stretches them while she suckles at her clit. It’s hard and eager under its hood, and she carefully pushes the skin back to lick at it directly.

Angela tenses, and that is the only warning Moira gets before the hand in her hair tightens into a fist and those hips are bucking up against her mouth. Angela’s thighs tense around her head and she can feel her clit twitching under her tongue as she soothes her through the orgasm.

“Moira! Moira—”

She didn’t expect her to call her name as she came. Moira’s own clit, erect and neglected, throbs. But she services Angela as her shaking lessens and her hand releases its hold and she slumps back. Moira licks and licks until she’s certain the bottom of her face is coated in Angela’s sticky arousal. Only when the hand insistently pushes her head back does she abandon her feast.

Angela sits up on the desk and crosses her legs in a futile attempt to make herself decent. Her cheeks are still flushed and her hair hopelessly disheveled, but her eyes have narrowed into that sort of steely anger again.

Moira supposes that if she finishes tonight, it’ll be by her own hand.

“Are you all right?” she asks carefully, torn between disdain for the woman before her and some sense of care for her sexual partners.

“What would you care?” Angela asks.

“I...” Moira doesn’t know how to respond. A bitter feeling rises in her throat. She initiated, didn’t she? Didn’t she? And this mess is her fault, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Angela shakes her head. Her face softens somewhat.

“Please...I’d rather be alone.”

Moira clicks her tongue. Not the first or last time she’ll hear that. She turns her back and fetches her jacket from where it was discarded on the floor. She supposes she can head back to the party in order to drink enough to force herself to sleep tonight. A stop at the toilets first to wash her face might be necessary.

“Have a good night,” she says flatly.

Angela doesn’t respond.

Ziegler, perhaps. Ziegler. This, whatever it has been, is over.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The comfort of a façade.

There is turbulence in the skies over the Pacific. Fio came over the intercom to tell them all to buckle, which Moira mindlessly did with her hands shaking. Now every jolt of the aircraft makes the restraints dig into her skin. Every sudden drop sends her stomach into her throat and makes her certain they’re going to fall out of the sky. The certainty brings with it a rush of vindictive joy: yes, this is how she dies.

McCree, apparently undisturbed by the rough flight, is sleeping upright with his head lolling and his mouth open. Aberman is knitting; Kumalo listening and bobbing his head along to something through his headphones.

But Reyes’ seat is empty. Even as the transport shudders and bumps along, he’s walking slowly but steadily over to where Moira sits alone by the door. He places a hand on her shoulder, perhaps just to keep his balance, but she finds the touch grounding.

“You ever kill someone before?” he asks. Though he doesn’t lower his voice, Moira doubts anyone else can hear him over the roar of the engines.

She is certain the answer is obvious in her entire demeanor, but she shakes her head anyway, and then attempts to speak, though her mouth is horridly dry.

In the field, it was easy to distance herself from it, amidst all the adrenaline and gunfire and with her life dependent on her keeping a grip on herself. But now, with no distraction from her thoughts, her mind is spinning in circles the way it does when she’s up late at night. And here are new memories to keep her from sleeping.

His helmet had slipped halfway off when he fell. Her desperate shots had caught him in the torso, in the arm, in the neck, and his face was covered in blood. But his eyes were wide and his mouth slightly open, and the entire situation had seemed at once too real and unbelievable. Then Kumalo pulled her away as they ran down the alley, and she left the corpse behind. Now it seems almost impossible that it happened at all. She has never shot anyone; she has never killed anyone; she never joined Blackwatch; she is still sitting at her father’s funeral, young and raw and angry and full of unanswered questions.

She breathes in and out and focuses on the buzz of the engines and on her surroundings.

“Animals. Lab animals.” Like that’s a distinction to make, like it’s less a trait of a sociopath if it’s with a needle on a lab table. “But not a human.”

“Talon soldiers aren’t human.”

She snorts. “I can’t tell myself that and make it so because it would be convenient.”

“Yes, you can. You have to,” he says calmly.

Her eyes flicker upward. His gaze is boring into hers. It’s brightly lit in the aircraft and his eyes look almost warm, his face almost gentle. Like a man who kills the way she’s seen him kill could ever be gentle.

“No. There are two avenues of justification. One is to argue that the victims deserve death. The second is to reframe oneself into the kind of person who would kill them. Into a monster.”

She is able to say it coldly and clinically. It is a word she has applied to herself almost her whole life, though never in quite such a fitting context as this.

“Right, but that’s the _avenue_ we want to avoid. That’s the kind of thinking that’ll send you straight to hell. You have to believe there’s still something worth salvaging inside yourself.

“And there is, Moira. I knew it when I hired you and when I made you start training for the field and when I brought you today. I don’t hire fuckers with nothing worth salvaging.”

She wants to believe him. She wants to not care what she did today. On some level, she already doesn’t; he _was_ a terrorist, and he would have shot her if she hadn’t shot him. He’s certainly less innocent than lab rats and rabbits.

But she still sees his face, all red, and his eyes wide like he saw death coming.

* * *

It is January and she is working alone in the lab, late, when the call comes through. The buzz of her phone is so sudden in the silence that she startles, spilling a bit of the test solution on her sleeve. She curses and tries to shake off the golden liquid while reaching for her phone.

There’s no name and she doesn’t recognize the number, but since she’s been startled from her reverie anyway she answers.

“O’Deorain.”

“Oh, I—I wasn’t sure you’d answer. I’m sorry to call so late, to call—well, at all—” The woman at the other end breaks off into a nervous sort of laugh.

“I’m sorry; I don’t—”

“This is Amélie. Uh, Lacroix.”

She’s sniffling. Moira straightens in her chair like a peacock spreading its tail, though there’s nobody to see. She doesn’t know what to begin to think about this. It has been almost two years since she passed a pleasant evening fucking Gérard Lacroix’s wife, and they haven’t exchanged a word since. Moira has long since assumed that book was closed, another chapter left behind her like every other person she’s used and discarded that way. She used Lacroix and Lacroix used her, and that was that.

Until today.

“Of course, Madame Lacroix. Are you all right?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine. I just wanted—”

Her voice breaks into a self-conscious mumble, but Moira thinks she hears and understands.

— _to talk to someone._

Moira imagines Amélie back in that messy little Parisian apartment. Is she curled up in bed, or seated at her kitchen table, or looking out the window? Are her eyes a bit red from crying? Moira thinks she knows the kind of expression her face would wear, though. It would be the same kind of desperate angry emptiness she sees on herself in the mirror so often.

How lonely Amélie must be, to be upset and to have nobody to call but the shell of a human who fucked her and left her nearly two years ago.

“You gave me your number and said you’d answer, and I just thought...”

Moira doesn’t remember that, but it sounds familiar enough. She’s passed her number to plenty of women. Vanishingly few of them  call after they leave in the morning. Vanishingly few of them she has hoped would call. The women she really wants, she doesn’t approach. She can blame that instinct on a desire to keep pretty things safe from her rottenness, or, less charitably, on a fear of the kind of rejection that would actually hurt.

“I remember. I’m glad you called. Did you have a performance tonight?”

“No, no. We’re still in rehearsals. I’m not even sure if...well, Gérard wants me to quit.”

“Why?”

“He wants me to move there, to Zurich. To live with him on the base.”

Moira glances around her lab, at the dull grey walls and the buzzing lights and the total lack of windows. She thinks of her tiny room and its single bed. The higher-ups get better accommodations, but not much better. This is a military base with a military purpose. It is not a home for a young woman used to living in comfort and style. It is not a home for civilians.

“You don’t want to, I presume?”

“Well, of course not!” Lacroix bursts out. “I love dancing and I love it here. Switzerland is beautiful, but I don’t want to live there. But I do want—I want to be near him. He’s my husband.”

“Yes, you love him,” Moira says, unable to stop the words from sounding sarcastic. She thinks of Lacroix’s eyes boring into hers and the way she guided Moira’s hands and mouth onto her, so lustful, so deliberate.

Lacroix, fortunately, seems not to notice her insincerity.

“I wish I could ask him to quit.”

“You can,” Moira says at once. “And if it’s what you want, you should.”

“I can’t! How selfish would I have to be? He is working to help—to _save—_ the world. What is that compared to my happiness?”

“Your happiness is important, Amélie,” Moira says quietly.

“Not compared to the world,” Lacroix laughs. “Even just saying that—I’m selfish. I want him to quit. I want him here by my side. I want him all for myself. How horrible—?

“If he would visit more often, or call every day. But he’s busy, and I know that, and it’s important work, and I’m not important. But he—when I met him, he made me feel important. He made me happy. I thought I would be happy forever, and now I’m not.

“I don’t even deserve to be happy! I’m not even a faithful wife. I’m calling you now, I’m—”

Her words break into sobs. The sound gets muffled as if she’s put the phone down, tried to make it less obvious that she’s crying. Moira continues to hold the phone to her ear, filled with something that feels like dismay and despair and, grotesquely, voyeurism.

The analog clock above the door ticks by the seconds. The forgotten beaker sits in front of her shimmers in the light as bubbles rise slowly to the top. Hundreds of kilometers away, Amélie Lacroix sobs.  Moira is incidental to all of these things, but she takes in all of them. What can she do if not observe?

Slowly the sobs become sniffles, and then the sniffles stop. Lacroix clears her throat and blows her nose, and her voice is low but strong when she speaks next.

“I’m sorry. How embarrassing of me.”

“It’s not embarrassing,” Moira says. “I’m happy to listen. You shouldn’t have to be alone.”

“Thank you,” Lacroix says earnestly. “Thank you so much for answering. I’m—going to try to get some sleep, I think.”

“Yes, you should.”

“Thank you again.”

“And Amélie? Your happiness matters.”

A brief pause. Then,

“Well, good night,” Lacroix says, and hangs up.

The seconds continue to tick by. Moira stares at the beaker. It is very cold in the lab, and there are goosebumps on her arms when she looks down at them. Suddenly she is tired too, a heavy sort of tiredness that makes even the idea of getting up seem impossible.

She puts her head in her hands and tugs at her short hair.

She cannot make Amélie Lacroix happy. She cannot even make herself happy. She said all she could say, and she does not regret it. But still she finds herself wishing that on that single evening, so many months ago, she had stayed the night.

* * *

“What are you doing in here?”

The words come out more sharply than she intended. She wants to sound even, businesslike. She wants to sound as if she doesn’t care, as if she wasn’t hurt by the way things ended last time. She would like to convince herself, as well as the other woman, of these things.

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“What do we have to talk about?”

Her footsteps sound softly, closer and closer. Moira keeps her eyes fixed on the printout on her desk. She will not look, because if she looks, she will see that pretty face, and think about how it looked blushing and lustful. She will think about how she tasted, and how she felt under her hands, and—shit.

“What are you working on?”

“Something horrible, to match the rest of me.”

Angela Ziegler reaches the desk. Her hand rests softly on the edge of it. Moira looks at her hand and at the white sleeve of her lab coat, but she doesn’t let her eyes wander further up.

“I’m sorry,” Ziegler says. “For last time.”

Moira shrugs. “Don’t be sorry. What does it matter?”

“Please, I mean it.”

Her tone is so gentle, almost pleading. Scorn rises thick and choking in the back of Moira’s throat. She wants to push Ziegler out of the office and slam the door in her face. She wants to kiss her again. She wants to make a decision that won’t keep her up at night. She wants a different body and a different life and different _genes,_ whatever would lead her not to wind up where she is.

“How can I help you, Doctor Ziegler?” she asks, and she finally leans back in her chair and looks up.

Ziegler is wearing more than she was the last time they were in such close proximity. Her hair is down today, framing her face with a pale golden halo. Moira wonders if her hair was down before she came to pay her coworker and one-time lover a visit.

“Commander Amari told me that you’ve been doubling as a field medic. I wondered if you wanted to run training drills together.”

Her blue eyes are wide and guileless. How can she look like that? How can she _always_ look like that? Her face is a doll’s face, hiding something much less beautiful. A snake coiled in a perfume bottle. Moira has collected evidence that she isn’t so angelic after all; if only it could have come without getting bitten.

“Training drills,” she echoes, arching an eyebrow.

Ziegler nods. “I’d like to practice with you. I think it would be more...enjoyable with a partner.”

“You have Ana Amari teaching you to shoot, but you’d rather run drills with me?”

“An—Captain Amari’s away. And is there any reason I can’t do both? I’ve been thinking about you. Your hands. Your _mouth._ ”

She tilts her head like a puppy. The effect is almost as adorable. Moira hates her and she hates herself for wanting her.

“Greedy.”

“Yes,” Ziegler agrees. Her eyes gleam and her lips twitch upward. “I have quite an appetite.”

Moira sighs aloud. As long as she’s under Gabriel’s purview, she’ll be making stupider decisions by the end of the week, which is an awful excuse but is at least _an_ excuse.

“Tonight, then. I have work to do. My room. Does eleven suit you, Doctor Ziegler?”

Ziegler smiles, as angelic and grating as every other inch of her. “It does. But please, call me Angela.”

* * *

“You’re hungry today, Moira.”

The words are light and conversational, but the blow is vicious. The belt leather catches hard on Moira’s ass and she bites her lips together while her skin burns. It hurts worse than she remembers, though perhaps that’s just because it’s been a while since she came to Ana Amari for _penance._

“Legs wider,” Ana says.

Moira obediently shuffles her feet further apart without really hearing or comprehending. Her eyes are closed and her mind is spiraling away from this room and base and herself. She envisions herself, almost unwillingly, kneeling at the altar rail of the church she attended through her youth. Back then it was always a different, much worse kind of pain, the kind that could not be easily assuaged or forgotten. But now it is all physical, and it feels _clean_ and _right,_ like cleaning out an open wound.

A strike on her inner thigh. She jolts and breathes in and out and lets the pain resonate.

Perhaps it is God who is hurting her. Perhaps her life really is a beautiful set of puzzle pieces falling into place one after the other, though she cannot see or fathom them. Perhaps everything makes sense after all.

Moira wishes, Moira _terribly, desperately_ wishes that she could believe that.

Ana hits her directly at the apex of her thighs. It catches Moira’s aching clit, and the feeling morphs. If she is still in the church of her childhood, the stained glass is broken and the altar is desecrated, and she is the holiest thing there.

The unearthly feeling slips away from her as a moan slips from her lips. She waits, eager for more now, but the next strike never comes.

“That’s enough, I think,” Ana says softly. Her warm hand gently caresses the vicious welts marring Moira’s backside. It feels good, but in that _wrong_ way that anything caring does.

“Enough?” Moira echoes. She is vexed to be pulled back to reality. In the past, Ana has never declared a finish to this; she will beat Moira until Moira asks her to stop.

“Thirty. If you want someone to kill you, you’ll need to look elsewhere.” Ana’s tone is still light, but when Moira straightens and turns to look at her, she isn’t smiling.

The shame bubbles up so fast and viciously that Moira almost tears up. This is her relief, her atonement, her poor substitute for religion, and now she cannot even appreciate it properly. If more than twice the usual amount of hits could not satisfy her, what could? Would she ever stop Ana’s hand?

“You’ve killed many people,” Moira mutters. “What’s one more?”

Ana does smile now. “I try not to make a habit of killing my lovers.”

Lovers. Is that what they are? Moira supposes she can’t think of a better word. If Ana thinks the beatings are entirely sexual, that’s probably for the best; perhaps she wouldn’t be so generous in indulging Moira if she knew exactly what her strong arm was a conduit for.

And lovers seems the best word when Ana settles herself back in Moira’s desk chair with her thighs spread and her face stern, when Moira, still naked, kneels between her thighs and works open her pants as she has done quite a few times before.

Ana is one of the most restrained women Moira’s ever gone down on. She only rarely moans, and usually the only signs of her pleasure are subtle. Her breath comes harder. Her thighs clench. Her hand, gently scratching along Moira’s scalp, tightens its grip.

Moira supposes they are similar in that. She wonders what Ana would be like with her guard completely down. Was there ever a time when Captain Amari did not have her walls so firm around her? She came of age in the Crisis, with a gun in her hands and dead comrades at her feet.

But even Angela, pretty, vapid, _infuriating_ Angela has her walls. Her every moan and kiss is perhaps as forced as Ana’s reticence.

Moira wonders if she’s ever actually seen anyone properly. Certainly she doubts she’s ever been seen. She is unconvinced it is possible.

An embraced artifice is the best approach. She will never be Amélie, sobbing and asking desperately where her marriage went wrong, unable to realize it was never the thing she thought it was in the first place.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A poison spreading.

The rat is not sedated. It runs around the little glass box with its nose twitching and its eyes taking in its surroundings. There is nothing in there for it to do, not even anything to chew on, so it mostly darts back and forth and stares at her through the glass. The woman who feeds them, who occasionally strokes them, who takes an unlucky one out and never brings it back.

Moira doesn’t believe in luck, good or bad, or curses. She doesn’t believe in any superstitions. She hardly believes in her fellow man, and she hasn’t believed in God since she was curious enough to read the Bible cover-to-cover back in early adolescence. She is a woman of science; this is the container into which she has placed herself, just as she has placed the rat into its cage to test her latest developments.

It is silly, how much time she spends shoring up defenses against the things she doesn’t believe in. Doesn’t spending the mental energy on them negate the point of disbelief? If she allows them so much real estate in her mind anyway, she may as well be a believer.

But whatever she told Gabriel all those months ago when she claimed her first human victim, Moira still desperately tries not to categorize herself as a monster. She cannot turn to superstition and religion, because they will serve as more confirmation of the same; the scars of her childhood told her that much.

She does not believe in curses, and yet everything close to her meets an awful end.

Logically, it is not her fault, of course. She gave the advice she could with the information she had. Amélie Lacroix has not been kidnapped by Talon _because_ Moira told her to push back against Gérard’s wishes. Amélie is not a victim of Talon because Moira laid hands on her years ago.

But Moira did tell her that, and she did touch her, and now…

She fits the device into its slot on the glass box. The solution is finicky and requires precisely the right temperature and energy. The rat looks up curiously, stretching its feet up and sniffing, though the opening is too high for it to reach. It is quite a fearless one. Rats are intelligent creatures, but it lacks the foresight to realize what fate has chosen for it.

That cannot really be considered a lack of intelligence, Moira thinks. Humans can’t tell, either, when their lives are about to be irrevocably changed.

Logically, it is not her fault. Logically, none of it has ever been her fault. Her father did not die because Moira was far from the perfect daughter. Her mother did not die because Moira didn’t call home from university enough.

But her heart, however much she has trained herself, however high her walls, does not respond to logic. It tells her a truth that has always felt more powerful than the rationales her brain conjures.

She is _wrong,_ and Amélie is merely her latest victim.

The rat begins to twitch. It scampers away from the miasma of purple light seeping into the box that will be its coffin, but there is no escape. Its sides begin to heave as it breathes quick and fast.

Moira watches. It is her duty to watch her experiment, of course, but this is not entirely why. She watches and wonders if Amélie is a rat in a cage, too, and if her end will be similarly sticky.

_This is why they call you a monster. This is why you call yourself a monster._

But it is also why Gabriel hired her.

The rat’s motions begin to slow. It slumps against the back wall of the container. Its dark eyes glint in the laboratory light. Does it see her now for what she is? Does it know that, for all the food and toys she has provided to their enclosure, this was her intention all along?

Her heart thrums. Her stomach is thick with disgust and nervousness and excitement. She watches it die in some attempt to respect it, like a hunter locking eyes with prey. It is not enough to make an ugly thing beautiful.

She has carefully inserted the sensors and sealed off the opening to the box when a loud knock on the laboratory door startles her. She swings her head around as the door opens and Reyes lets himself in. He’s wearing an even grimmer expression than usual, but paired with casual clothes of the type she’s rarely seen him in before. Jeans and a button-up look as odd on him as his uniform would on anyone else.

“Can I help you?” she asks crisply.

“We’re going out.”

“‘We?’”

The thermometer in the box beeps. She ignores it. She is irritated to be interrupted when her work is showing such promise, when she wants to be left alone to watch the rat die and watch herself die and think of Amélie in a cage somewhere, probably dying.

“A drink. My bill. Come on.”

“Is this a mandatory event, Commander Reyes?” She only uses his title anymore when he’s annoying her. He never reacts. It slides off of him like all things do, like oil refusing to mix with water. He is a wall of a man far more than Wilhelm could ever hope to be.

“Yes. You need it. You all do.”

He comes closer. He looks down at the dead rat and the sickly cloud filling her cube. When she fails to respond, he speaks again.

“We’ve gotten complacent. We thought that when the Crisis was over, so was the threat. Overwatch still hung around like a bad cold, and we picked up more parasites.

“We didn’t take Talon seriously enough. We could have given her security or forced her to come here. We didn’t. We didn’t think they’d go after her. So tonight we’re gonna have a drink, and tomorrow we’re going to hunt them down.”

His gaze is too intense. She looks away. His presence and his words have only made her feel worse. Now her throat feels raw and the air is stifling like she is the one dying in a box.

Isn’t she?

“Why do you think I’m concerned about Lacroix—?”

“Because I know, Moira. I know every last bit of your dirty laundry and everybody else’s in Blackwatch. Gérard doesn’t know. Golden boy Jack doesn’t know. But I know. So I’m telling you to come with me and stop blaming yourself. People die. It’s my fault more than yours, and Talon’s fault most of all.”

Her voice comes out a whisper. She still can’t meet his eyes.

“I need to finish my measurements.”

“Hurry up, and then we’ll go.”

* * *

It is a picturesque evening in Rialto: the sunset shading the sky golden and purple and deep blue, the centuries-old buildings lining the streets and canals, the gondolas passing up and down along the water, and the uniformed hordes of Talon soldiers bearing down on them from every angle with the intent and means to kill.

Well. Perhaps not the last aspect as much as the others. But the city is lovely, and, as with so many of the other places fieldwork for Blackwatch has taken her, Moira doubts she would have ever come here otherwise. She steals glances, like an excited tourist, at the architecture and the reflections in the water in between dodging bullets and making sure the others aren’t getting themselves killed.

Considering the evening’s events, she is in a remarkably good mood. Perhaps even because of them. Antonio got what he deserved, and now there are more Talon gnats for her to lay her claws into. The killing will not rescue Amélie, and perhaps it will prove futile even to rescue them, but it feels vindicating.

Besides, she won’t die here. This isn’t how she’s meant to go.

“We should have done it right. This is your fault, Commander,” McCree grouses. He won’t shut up about it, though the deed’s done and they’ve done worse before. Moira doesn’t know why this is the particular instance that’s made Jesse grow a conscience, but she wishes he could at least wait until they’re back on the transport and she has earplugs on hand.

“It’s always my fault. I’ll take the blame and the credit, and next time you can run point.” Gabriel’s face is its usual mask of determination, but the lines are harder, his brow furrowed.

He didn’t _want_ to kill Antonio. He felt he had no choice.

“We’ve killed dozens of Talon soldiers tonight,” Moira interjects breezily. “I don’t hear you mourning _them,_ Jesse.”

“It’s different and you know it, both of you.”

“Is it? Or are you just trying to justify your own actions while condemning the commander’s?”

“You really want to go, Moira?” Jesse asks. He’s perhaps angrier than she’s ever seen him, and she doesn’t understand. Antonio got what was coming to him. There’s now one less louse in the world selling contraband and sitting on a bloody throne. Jesse is moaning like they broke into a civilian’s home and murdered an infant.

“I don’t particularly care. I want _you_ to quit grip—”

“Shut up, both of you! Dropship!”

Genji, usually so quiet, startles both of them out of their argument. Moira glances around again. The square behind them is clear aside from the scattered corpses of human and omnic agents alike, but there is the sound of footsteps ahead and, sure enough, the hum of engines. They’re so close to the art museum and then the pickup spot beyond it, but they’ve had to fight every block they’ve traveled so far, and she never expected the rest would be easy.

“Stay back,” Gabriel orders. He edges along the toward the street corner. Moira presses herself back against the brick as the sound of the ship grows from a hum to a roar. Then, without warning, there is an immense _thud_ and the ground under their feet shakes. Another roar follows, similar but distinct to the ship’s engines. The way they came, lined with bodies, suddenly seems very appealing.

“Shit. Find cover, all of you! This isn’t like the others—”

Gabriel’s words are drowned out as an omnic larger than any Moira’s ever seen comes barreling down the old street, its engines flaming, cobblestones cracking under its weight. It is a story tall and nearly fills the width of the street, and Moira doesn’t need to be told twice to duck back for the cover of walls that suddenly seem remarkably fragile.

“The fuck is that thing?” Jesse exclaims, reloading his pistol and ducking down into an alley across from Moira. On the balcony above her, Genji is crouched silently, waiting like a trap to be sprung.

“A heavy assault unit, if I correctly reviewed the briefing material we were all provided,” she quips, countering Jesse’s glare with a smirk.

Then there is little opportunity either to speak or to look at the others, for the deafening sound like machine gun fire amplified many times over rips through the air. Gabriel’s shotguns blast in response, staccato bursts in the night.

Moira raises her left hand. Her eyes dart back and forth between her surroundings and the display of her fellows’ health readouts projected through her contacts. The energy draining _does_ work on omnics, but its power is limited compared to the others’ weapons. Besides, the system is still very much a work in progress; she doesn’t want to overexert it here and now.

Jesse ducks out long enough to empty his magazine into the behemoth. Moira fervently hopes his shots aren’t just ricocheting off its carapace. The omnic pauses, and then turns, and its spray of bullets is directed their way now.

She runs out of its line of fire with a speed fueled by adrenaline. An instant later, her brick wall succumbs to the onslaught and crumbles. The plaza is otherwise horribly open. She ducks into a doorway and presses herself against the wood. The horrible sound persists until her head throbs.

“Fucker!” Jesse, on the unit’s other side, abandons his cover to draw its attention. One of his bullets manages to catch its right arm; the machine gun jams. The omnic roars as if it can feel anger and turns on him.

Jesse’s indicator goes red. Moira doesn’t really think about what she’s doing. She ducks cover and sees him, hiding behind the fragile confines of a pillar. He’s gripping his shoulder; his left arm is hanging limply at an unnatural angle. She stretches out her own right arm to initiate the process of pulling _life,_ if it can be called that, from the unit.

But the omnic’s fire has paused as it reloads, and its attention refocuses from the wounded Jesse to this odd new threat. Her speed is nothing compared to its movements, and abruptly she is staring down a barrel larger than her own head.

Moira wonders what all her fuss and worry has been about, when her life is a thing that will be extinguished in an instant here on a pleasant old street.

Something hits her _hard,_ not a bullet, and she goes down onto the street, yes, but still very much alive. She barely manages to arrest her fall and looks upward to see Gabriel blasting the omnic’s arm point-blank, and a dark flash from above.

Genji’s sword is glowing that unearthly lurid green they’ve all seen before but never really accepted, and it cuts through the metal of the heavy assault unit as if it were paper.

The omnic comes apart and crashes to the ground in a heap of smoking metal, leaking lubricant and fuel like blood. Jesse leans around his column and offers a shaky smile through gritted teeth. And Gabriel reaches down to grab her arm and pull her to her feet, but before she can say anything or even catch her breath he forces her back against the nearest wall.

He is angrier than she’s ever seen him. His lips are pulled back in a snarl and his eyes seem like they might begin emitting sparks. The sight is jarring. The rush of adrenaline abandons her.

“We don’t fucking do that,” he informs her in a voice like thunder.

“I’m afraid I don’t follow, Commander—”

“You think you’re immortal, O’Deorain? You think you’ve got somewhere else to die, is that it? You leave the recklessness to me.”

“McCree was injured; he needed—”

“He needed a _live medic_ to treat him. But you just throw yourself out like you want to be a hero. Is _that_ it, O’Deorain? Want to die here and get it over with?”

She has no answer for him. Reality is settling back onto her, and it feels heavy.

“So you leave the recklessness to me, _right_?”

“All yours, _sir,_ ” she spits out, and he releases her. Genji and Jesse stand there, motionless, watching the altercation, probably glad it’s not their turn to be chewed out. She steadies herself and then walks over to Jesse to get a closer look at his arm. She can still feel Gabriel’s glare burning into her.

There it is, the feeling of being seen. That elusive sensation she’ll prostrate herself to Ana Amari to get. But here and now, it is empty and cold rather than euphoric.

* * *

“Please.”

Angela Ziegler’s eyes are glassy and distant. She is looking at Moira but not seeing Moira; she is looking through her, at a more pleasant memory, at the last woman to don the strap-on she keeps in her bedside table so her visitors can fuck her.

Moira looks down at her and sees her so clearly, a desperate whimpering woman who squirms as Moira rolls her hips hard and plunges deep into her, whose heels dig into Moira’s back, whose lips are shiny with spit and whose tongue is _eager_ with pleas.

This is a clear enough sign of what exactly Angela is doing, if all the others hadn’t been: the late-night summons, that she let Moira into her room for the first time, the desperate look in her eyes.

It rubs Moira the wrong way, but she is still here. She comes when called, and no matter how much she may scorn the woman underneath her, she still comes for her like a dog on a leash.

But today, if she is a dog, she is a rabid hound. She finds herself, more than ever before, filled with the desire to _hurt_ Angela, not just to debase her and leave her flushed and spent, but to dig her hands in hard to her hips until her nails leave crescents and her fingers leave marks. To pull her hair _hard._ To bite and suck at her nipples with her teeth bared and all pretense of gentleness abandoned. Every moan spurs her on, incenses her more. Is there anything Angela won’t get off on?

“Please!”

Angela begs her with eyes hazy and pretty mouth open. Her neck and tits are covered with red marks. Her cunt is wet and gaping, the strap-on gliding with ease through the slick that pours from her like a flood. Moira would like to taste her, lick her clean, but there is something very satisfying too about fucking her hard like this, hearing Angela whimper when the dildo slides out of her, seeing her eyes roll back when it thrusts up into her sensitive, desperate pussy.

She knows that Angela is not really begging her, in the same way she is not looking at her. She is begging the ghost of a woman who left on a transport a month ago and never came back.

Angela’s hands are tangled in her hair, pulling and tugging with abandon. Moira wishes she could enjoy it. She wonders if, after she’s finished indulging in the fantasy, she could ask Angela if they could trade places and she could beat Moira’s ass black and blue while bending her over the bed.

She would be lying if she said she hadn’t fantasized about that, about the good doctor’s blue eyes looking cold and hard as slate as she looked Moira up and down and found her wanting. But that would require Angela to see her at all, to see her as anything other than a sex toy, better than a vibrator but serving the same purpose.

Moira clenches her teeth and a pang goes through her. At least with Ana it was _transactional._ At least Ana let her feel like she existed as a person. Angela is merely a reminder of all the women who have trailed before her, pretty things looking for a rough hand and the allure of a woman like Moira, pillow princesses who professed to be into her but wouldn’t dream of getting their mouths anywhere near her cunt.

None so pretty as Angela. None so smart as Angela. Perhaps that’s why it hurts as it does.

Moira feels sick and empty and desperately hungry. She thought this would be a suitable distraction, would sate her at least a little, and instead it has opened up every last wound she’s tried to paper over and ignore for the past two decades of her life. Her time is slipping away, and the things she has do not satisfy, and it is becoming rapidly clear that the things she once wanted will never be hers.

Angela’s eyes are misty and clouded with tears, but still she moans and gasps and clenches her legs harder around Moira’s waist. And even disgusted as she is, at herself and the woman underneath her, Moira _wants_ her, is caught in the throes of that lust, like Angela is a fucking drug and she can’t stop herself coming back for more.

She reaches between their bodies and rubs roughly at Angela’s clit just to get it over with, and soon enough Angela is crying out and rutting hard against the strap-on deep inside her. The tears spill out of her eyes and over her cheeks even as she moans her pleasure through the aftershocks.

Moira pulls out with a wet squelch. Angela’s panting slowly evens out into deep, heavy breaths. Her eyes seem to refocus. She seems to actually look at Moira for the first time that evening.

“Will you stay with me?” she says, in the soft voice of an angel. It could be years ago and the woman under Moira could be Amélie. She is always a puzzle piece jammed uncomfortably into the wrong spot. She is always just a balm to ease the memory of someone else.

Not dead yet, but always a ghost.

“Did Ana stay with you?” Moira asks, mocking.

The face Angela makes, taken aback, insulted, hurt, fills Moira with more pleasure than the rest of this sordid affair has.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At last, an answer.

Ana has been a corpse for months and months. Gabriel gains more and more wrinkles, more silver hairs. His grim face gets grimmer, and McCree stops protesting the killings. Blackwatch pulls away from Overwatch proper like pulling off a scab, even as the world’s condemnation and clamoring that they be disbanded grows louder and louder.

For Moira, it is business as usual. What period of her life has she not existed on the periphery, an outcast and object of scorn?

For others, it must be harder, she thinks, as she leans in the doorway of Angela Ziegler’s office and observes how tired she looks. It must be harder to bear the world’s judgment when you’re used to laud and praise and adoration. But angels can fall, even ones so pretty and smart and talented as the little Swiss surgeon who once had the world wrapped around her finger.

Moira feels like a scavenger. She is there to pick up remains, to observe the aftermath.

“Doctor O’Deorain,” Angela greets her, and her smile is too weak to make her face look any younger.

“Doctor Ziegler,” Moira returns. It’s been long enough that it would feel awkward to call her by her first name, but the _doctor_ doesn’t sit right on her tongue either. “What can I do for you?”

She asks like she doesn’t know, like it isn’t obvious in Angela’s face and posture and in every aspect of what their _relationship_ has been until this point.

“I wanted a second opinion on an augmentation to the Valkyrie suit.” Angela shifts then, pulls open her lab coat just enough to show that yes, she’s wearing the Valkyrie under it. Moira’s eyebrows raise. Such brazenness is not unusual in Angela, but somehow it always feels like a surprise.

“My second opinion? You must really be scraping the barrel.” Moira takes a step or two into the office, allowing the door to silently close and automatically lock behind her.

“Your opinions do, I must admit, have _some_ merit,” Angela says. Her smile widens then, and something of the angel is still there, but Moira is not enraptured. She looks at her and sees her properly, perhaps for the first time, and she feels nothing at all.

“Doctor Ziegler, _I_ must admit that I don’t think you called me here for a second opinion at all,” Moira drawls, and she steps closer and closer.

Angela leans back. Her pupils are large and her cheeks just a bit flushed. She is prey, waiting to be devoured.

“No. I think your reasons were far from professional.” Moira leans down, and Angela tilts her head to the side, baring her neck like she can’t fucking help herself. Moira murmurs her next words an inch from her skin. “Perhaps the stress of work was just too much today. Perhaps you’ve been lonely. But we both know why you called me here.”

“Why?” Angela whispers in response. Moira smiles.

“You want me to fuck you like the whore you are while your patients rest in the medbay. You want me to make you come against the wall as you try not to scream. You want me to touch you and make you come until you’re too spent to move. Or maybe you did want a second opinion, on how easily that suit comes off. How well it would serve for a quick little _rendezvous_ in the field.”

Angela’s neck grows redder and redder. Her breath comes quicker. Moira rests one of her hands on the desktop, her arm brushing Angela’s.

“You’re desperate. You want to feel wanted. And I’m good at making you come, aren’t I, sweetheart? I’ve always been very good at making pretty women come. Hardly any as pretty as you, though.”

“Stop teasing me,” Angela whines. She is squirming in her seat, rubbing her thighs against each other in search of some relief for her poor, aching center. Moira wonders how wet she is, but only in a detached sort of way. The curiosity of a scientist rather than the passion of a lover.

“I’m not teasing. I’m telling you something important, so listen to me.”

Moira straightens up and stares down at her. Angela shifts in the chair, her eyebrows furrowing in confusion as she looks upward, one hand drumming impatiently on the armrest.

“I’ve had enough of playing my part in the drama you’re so desperate to enact. I don’t care if you cast me as the villain; I’m used to that. But I don’t have any more interest in continuing this farce. You only asked me to come here because Ana’s six feet under and you need someone to share your bed.

“You’re a parasite attaching itself onto whatever will keep it warm, and I’m running out of blood to give. Find another idiot to go down on you, Doctor Ziegler. I have better things to do.”

This time, the color that floods Angela’s face is certainly not due to arousal. She pushes her desk chair back and stands up in a quick, jerky motion, but still Moira towers over her.

“You could have just not shown up if I’m so repulsive to you! You could have told me you weren’t interested! You didn’t have to—”

“You’ve never made a secret of how little you think of me. Admit it—all I am to you is a mouth and pair of hands. I thought it only fair to return the favor.”

“Then get out! Crawl back to your office and to whatever demonic mission Blackwatch has this week!” Her eyes are so bright against her flushed pink cheeks.

“Your work funds those demonic missions. It’s time to abandon the high ground, Angela. You’re no better than the rest of us in this pit.”

“Get _out_!”

Moira obeys. The door slams hard behind her. She stands in the hallway for a few seconds, breathing slowly and filled with an odd elation, a buoyancy. That felt good. It felt better than anything else could have.

She’s always enjoyed burning bridges, at least until she realizes later that she needed to cross a chasm after all.

* * *

“Beg pardon?”

She punctuates her question with an incredulous laugh, though there is nothing to laugh at. She knows she heard him correctly, and he knows it too, based on the measured way he looks at her.

“I want you to use me for your tests,” he says calmly. “Genetic therapy, or whatever they’re calling it now.”

“What do you want out of it?” she asks, the methodical part of her assuming control of her vocal cords while the rest of her continues its panicked protest.

“You’ve turned yourself into a weapon, and I’d like the same. And I want knowledge—I want to know exactly what the Soldier Enhancement Program did to me.”

“You want me to infringe upon the genetic copyright of the United States’ military? Foolish even for you.”

“You’re not a coward, Moira, or concerned with convention. Don’t pretend to be. You’ve done less legal things before. I’ve watched you do them.”

“You’ve _ordered_ me to do them,” she says pointedly.

“Not all of them,” he says. He is almost eerily unruffled. Lately his temper has been mercurial even on the best days, and she isn’t sure she’s seen him crack a smile since McCree absconded from Blackwatch months ago. But right now, he’s steady, almost serene. Like a man resigned to his own fate. It feels wrong when he’s always been so filled with life and passion and focus. In Venice he held her to a wall and reprimanded her for recklessness; now he’s heading for the gallows himself.

“Why are you asking me this?” she eventually asks.

“Who else is there to ask?”

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s an order, O’Deorain. I don’t give you reasons.”

She bristles. He rarely uses that line when they’re not in the field, and he’s almost never used it on her. She hates the reminder that, much as she wants to be independent and self-sufficient, she is his subordinate. She subsists on Overwatch for room and board and funding for her research. Her only leverage would be reporting _Commander Reyes_ to Morrison or the U.N., both actions that would result in her own livelihood disintegrating in an instant.

She’s gotten so used to being a dog on a leash, but she can’t stand the reminder of that fact.

“I’m afraid I’ll need a reason, Commander, or I’ll have to decline.”

“Why would you decline?” he asks flatly. She frowns.

“Human experimentation isn’t exactly something I’m eager to jump into.”

“Just self-experimentation? And all those field experiments on Talon soldiers? Stop pretending you have a conscience. That’s not why I hired you.”

It stings. She doesn’t know why.

“You told me to avoid thinking of myself as a monster,” she says, and she is a child desperately asking for reassurance that she can no longer find anywhere else.

“No more playing pretend. You know what you are and I know what I am.”

Maybe he notices her reaction. Maybe he decides a different tactic will be more effective. Whatever the reason, his voice softens and he relaxes to rest his arms on her desk.

“I know you never wanted your reputation. Didn’t deserve it, either. You didn’t start experimenting on yourself because you didn’t give a shit; you did it because you were the problem you wanted to solve.”

She feels her stomach drop and her throat tighten. She doesn’t want him to keep talking. She needs him to shut up and for what he’s about to say to remain where it’s always existed, a secret festering under her skin and coloring everything she does. Just hers. _Only hers._

“How did your father die, Moira?”

She mutely shakes her head. She can’t speak. Her throat feels blocked-off.

“How did he die?”

When she fails, again, to respond, he sighs and pulls the folder out from under his arm to open it on her desk. Contained within it are prints of images from a brain scan. Her brain, from the MRI a week ago, when the terror overtook her and she made a trip to the lab at three in the morning to assuage or confirm her paranoia.

A normal brain, if anything about her can be considered normal. A healthy brain, for now. For now.

“Why do you have those,” she manages, no real heart in the words, like she’s reading from a script.

“I told you. I know everything about you. Where you came from, and where you’re headed. Now tell me how he died.”

“If you know everything, you don’t need me to say.”

“You want to say. You want to tell someone.”

She hates him for this, for manipulating her. For controlling her. For not letting her keep her secret a secret, or at least imagining she is. She feels like a fish caught on a line, the hook lodged in her throat and determined to pull the words out of her.

How did her father die? Of an incomprehensibly small piece of his brain malfunctioning and convincing the rest to follow suit. He died swiftly and suddenly and horribly. He died like a zombie, pacing the hall between her parents’ room and hers on the nights when he couldn’t sleep because his brain was turning itself into Swiss cheese. He died with everything that made him himself gone, without thought or awareness or dignity.

He died passing the same fate on to her.

Her father was distant and distracted and seemingly perplexed by her even before his brain turned against itself. Moira was never particularly fond of him. But she will always be haunted by seeing him robbed of his very self by nothing more than a simple accident on the smallest scale.

“Fatal familial insomnia,” she says, her teeth digging into her lips hard enough that she starts to taste blood. What a beautifully evocative name it is. Completely understandable and to-the-point even when the rest of the world of medicine is filled with baffling nomenclature.

She knew at once what it meant when the doctor told them so many years ago, her father already mostly gone, her mother pale and aghast. Even if her daughter was already stubborn and precocious and bucked every convention they tried to swaddle her in, apparently hearing that she might be fated to follow her father to a miserable early grave was too much.

“She—my mother—never let me get tested. Better not to know, she said, the imbecile.” Moira chokes out a bitter laugh, the sound of words left unspoken and festering for decades. Across the desk, Gabriel’s eyes watch her, bright and intense. “Better for her, maybe. She could just keep pretending I was normal, the way she did with everything else. Love that pretty box labeled _daughter_ without bothering to mess about with the contents.

“Then she kicked the bucket too, and there was nothing stopping me, and the rest is history. But you know all that, don’t you, since you know everything?”

He blinks slowly, like a cat. His eyes bore into hers.

“Do you believe in God, Moira?”

“No,” she laughs, incredulous, taken aback. “How could I?”

“I do,” he says, and if it was anyone other than him she would be terrified she’s about to be subjected to some sort of drivel about how everything that’s happened to her _matters,_ that it’s all part of some greater plan, that it isn’t like she won the world’s worst lottery. “I was raised Catholic too, you know, and left it the same way you did. But now I think there is something. Humanity is Sisyphus, pushing against something that’ll never move. Invent robots to make our lives easier and they massacre us by the millions. Build an organization to stop them and cause collateral damage and cracks across the globe. Join the Soldier Enhancement Program to save your subordinates’ lives and watch them all evaporate in an air strike in front of you. Work from the shadows to keep someone you love and everything he built safe until he turns on you and pushes you away. Learn how to extract life from other organisms and use it to replenish your own, but you can’t turn off the time bomb of your own genes.

“I’m getting weaker,” he says, lacing the word with contempt as if it’s a curse. He looks away from her to stare down at his hands. She traces the wrinkles of his face with her eyes and counts silver hairs among the black ones. “Older. I need to be able to keep going. I need to keep fighting. I need to be strong enough for whatever comes next.”

She feels very heavy in that moment. Unsteady. Vulnerable.

But she also feels seen.

She wonders what he envisions in the future. She envies the ability to imagine a future at all, when her own is walls closing in around her and a guillotine fixed above her head with the robe wearing away and waiting for just the right moment to snap.

When she was younger, she had fire. She used to believe that she would be able to save herself, that her sharp mind and endless supply of determination would see her through to something that would give her a future. She used to dream about being a hero, a real hero, at least to the handful of people unlucky enough to have also lost the genetic lottery.

Then determination yielded no results, and the side effects of her research garnered international criticism, and she came to accept the end she had fought so fiercely to stave off.

But the look in Gabriel’s eyes makes her feel, stupidly, illogically, that perhaps she abandoned hope too soon.

“I can’t make any promises, Commander,” she says. “Perhaps we’re just pushing against the wall ourselves.”

“Better to push than to accept it,” he says, and his lips turn up into a gaunt, humorless smile.

* * *

The passers-by know better than to let their gazes linger on the pair of women walking together down the hall. That the Minister of Genetics has left her Oasis to appear within their midst is undoubtedly noteworthy, but her eyes are sharp and her face cold, and nobody is eager to look for too long. At her side, the Widowmaker is a spectacle, unusually vulnerable with her hair down in a shining curtain and only a patient’s gown to preserve her modesty, but there is no forgetting that she is a weapon first and a person a very distant second.

A pity, really. Moira almost wishes they would look. She keeps her arm tight around Amélie’s shoulder, ostensibly to help her walk after this latest operation, but also as a very clear message. Her tool. Her weapon. Her experiment.

Hers.

Amélie is stiff and unresponsive to the touch, for now at least. She keeps her eyes fixed straight ahead and her mouth in a slight frown. She is nowhere near as expressive as she used to be, but Moira loves her like this. Her existence has narrowed to a single purpose, and she serves it so well. Her face was beautiful before, but as the face of a killer it is radiant.

Moira knows she dislikes the arm around her. She dislikes the stifling reminder that, no matter how much slack they give her leash, she is Talon’s creation and Talon’s property.

Moira’s.

Amélie’s quarters in this particular base are spartan, especially compared to the comforts of the chateau where she passes most of her time. There is a cot with a thin blanket and barely room for one, a sink set into the wall, and a tiny cabinet for possessions.

When the door is safely closed behind them, Amélie pulls the gown off and throws it aside, then stands still and waiting. She watches Moira out of the corner of her eye. Her face is still, but Moira has gotten very good at reading her like this, at deciphering every minute twitch and motion. When it is her work to play about in the tiniest pieces of the human gene, such tells should be clear for her. She always has been a woman of details.

“How do you feel?” Moira asks. Her fingers trace along the red incision just below Amelie’s heart, the site of this latest augmentation. Amélie breathes in deeply. Her breasts rise and fall, and she inclines her chin just a bit to look Moira in the eyes.

“I don’t feel anything,” she recites flatly.

But her eyes are dark and her lips are parted, and what was true when Amélie Lacroix was a young ballerina married to a man she rarely saw is true now too when she has been reshaped into an assassin, a weapon.

Moira continues to slide her fingers lightly over Amélie’s skin. The dip of her throat. The line of her collarbones. Down her breastbone, down her stomach to the dip of her belly button, stopping just above the thatch of dark curls. Then she ghosts her fingers over her nipples, and she watches Amélie’s eyes flicker, watches her silently want.

Try as they might, Talon and Moira yet lack the skill to crush a final gleam of humanity. Amélie still, even like this, desires the closeness of another person.

Talon soldiers do not interact with her beyond what is required on missions. Connecting with normal people is all but impossible for the _Widowmaker_ now. Moira hypothesizes that the desire for intimacy is what drives Amélie’s remarkable marksmanship. Predator and prey, linked in the moment of death, as human a feeling as any other.

The closest she can get to a _relationship_ is Moira.

When Moira lets her hand tangle in Amélie’s silken, beautiful hair, and when she pulls, Amélie lets her shell break further. Her eyelashes flutter over her golden eyes. A soft sigh exits her.

“How do you feel?” Moira asks again.

Amélie looks up at her. Her lip curls; her nostrils flare just a bit. But she leans in and presses her naked body against Moira’s clothed one, and her lips brush her ear.

“Hungry.”

But it is Moira who will eat, who will splay Amélie on her back on the bed and dig her teeth into every part of her, who will kiss her and touch her and eat her out until Talon’s perfect weapon writhes and cries out and comes under her tongue just as she did years ago when she fucked Moira O’Deorain behind her husband’s back.

She will eat, for who does Moira have but her, this shell of a woman bound to her by the most monstrous of circumstances? What else does she have but a new title and a new occupation and layers of filth that will never wash off her hands?

_Lacroix trusted you,_ Amélie said, the first time she and Moira met on Talon’s terms. The words and the sight of her sent a chill up Moira’s spine, but she shook the feeling off and went to work. Now it seems almost like a joke. Lacroix trusted her?  What a fool, to make so much of a night and a phone call. Even now, the Widowmaker clings to whoever is near to her. 

Moira only wishes she did not do the same.

But Amélie’s hair is still so soft under her fingers, and though it takes more to coax noise from her, she is still wet and eager for Moira’s hands and mouth.

Moira is years older than her father ever grew to be. Her days rush by and she waits for that single protein somewhere in her brain to set off the chain reaction that will leave her senile and doddering and, in the end, in a grave nobody will have the least interest in visiting.

But in the moment Amélie is tight around her fingers, and Moira wears the title _Minister_ like a crown, and she isn’t sure what she has to live for that dying should be such a terrifying prospect anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed this.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments always appreciated!


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